Team Building

Continuing with our 42 Rules to Lead by Google’s Senior Vice President Jonathon Rosenberg, this week our focus is on Team Building.

• Interview well – You have to learn how to interview well – just like you would learn any other skill.  People love to work with great people.  They not only make a great company, they also attract more great people.
• Hire by committee – All to often, companies allow hiring managers to call all the shots.  It should be by committee, and, similarly, promotions should be a peer review process.
• You can’t teach passion – When enthusiasm is real, everyone can feel it – it’s a tangible energy that lights people up.  When hiring, it’s important to spot passion, even in other areas of a candidate’s life.  “How can you expect people to be passionate at work if they’re not passionate about anything?”
• Slow down – Urgency of a role isn’t sufficiently important to compromise quality in hiring.
• Diversity is your best defense – People with different backgrounds see the world a little differently. That’s invaluable.  You can’t teach that kind of insight.
• Be selective – Instead of laying off the bottom 10%, don’t hire them.  It’s way harder to fire people than it is to hire them.
• Life isn’t fair – You shouldn’t tell people they are doing a great job when they’re not.  Real life is a meritocracy.  Some perform better than others.  So if you want better performance from the best, celebrate and reward what you want to see more of.
• Identify and purge – It’s important to single out and remove the bad eggs.  Rosenberg has a whole bad egg theory:  “You go to a party and there’s six pieces of sushi left.  Your friend goes ahead of you.  He takes five pieces.  Bad egg.  You see someone in the dining hall.  They spill something, and they give it a perfunctory wipe.  Bad egg.  Get rid of bad eggs.